Nat Taylor — Blog, AI, Product Management & Tinkering

Google Assistant Tips

Published on Sep 11, 2020.

I use Google Assistant daily with the commands below and thought it was just OK, but then I tried the magical BabyConnect “Conversation Action.”

As you can see in the animation, you say something like “Talk to BabyConnect to log a mixed diaper” and it dispatches the message to the BabyConnect servers to do your bidding. With a newborn your often hands free, so being able to talk to an app really feels futuristic. Usually I hate such “Chat Bots” but I literally reveled for an entire day in how natural and useful this particular action is.

The other actions that I use include:

• Set the scene to daylight which controls my smart lights
• Set a timer which we routinely use for cooking
• Add <item> to the shopping list which I can manage with Google Keep
• Play the news which I’ve configured to play the NPR hourly news
• Play WBUR which it knows to stream from TuneIn
• Play Foo Fighters which it knows to do in a music app
• What’s the weather? which says the weather

My favorite skill is “Memory Aid” which you can trigger with “Remember that <something>” and then you can ask it “What/where is <something>?” I meet a lot of neighbors with dogs and I can remember the dogs’ names but not the parents, so I use this routinely has “Remember that Rover’s parents are Jack and Jill.” Similarly when my son got sick, I was having trouble remembering the medical name of the bacteria, so I said “Remember that Ellis got the bacterial infection Campylobacter jejuni”

Also, living in a neighborhood with roughly 50% Spanish speakers, “Be my Spanish interpreter” is an amazing skill too!